Back Aa

Women of History

Close

<h3>MARY BRUNTON.</h3> [BORN 1778. DIED 1818.] DR BRUNTON. <ANTIMG src="images/im.jpg" alt="M" width-obs="71" height-obs="68" class="floatl" />ARY Brunton, [authoress of the novels "Self-Control" and "Discipline," was the only daughter of Colonel Thomas Balfour of Elwick, and of Frances Ligonier, only daughter of Colonel Francis Ligonier, the brother of Field-Marshal the Earl of Ligonier. From her sixteenth year (although her mother is spoken of as still alive at a much later date), it is stated that the entire charge of her father's household devolved upon her, and left her very little time for anything else. Thus matters continued till she was nearly twenty. Meanwhile her future husband, Dr Brunton, and she had met, when or where we are not informed.] Dr Brunton merely says: "About this time, Viscountess Wentworth, who had formerly been the wife of Mrs Balfour's brother, the second Earl Ligonier, proposed that Mary, her god-daughter, should reside with her in London. What influence this alteration might have had on her after-life is left to be matter of conjecture. She preferred the quiet and privacy of a Scotch parsonage. We were married in her twentieth year, and went to reside at Bolton, near Haddington." [A love of reading had been an early passion with her, but in her childhood it had spent itself mostly in poetry and fiction; and her want of leisure afterwards had withdrawn her to a great extent even from literature of that description.] "Her time," Dr Brunton continues, "was now much more at her own command. Her taste for reading returned in all its strength, and received rather a more methodical direction. Some hours of every forenoon were devoted by her to this employment; and in the evenings I was in the habit of reading aloud to her books chiefly of criticism and belles lettres. Among other subjects of her attention, the philosophy of the human mind became a favourite study with her, and she read Dr Reid's works with uncommon pleasure." After their removal to Edinburgh, their circle increased. "She mingled more with those whose talents and acquirements she had respected at a distance.... She had often urged me to undertake some literary work, and once she appealed to an intimate friend who was present whether he would not be my publisher. He consented readily, but added that he would at least as willingly publish a book of her own writing. This seemed at the time to strike her as something the possibility of which had never occurred to her before, and she asked more than once whether he was in earnest. A considerable part of the first volume of 'Self Control' was written before I knew anything of its existence. When she brought it to me, my pleasure was mingled with surprise. The beauty and correctness of the style, the acuteness of observation, and the loftiness of sentiment, were, each of them in its way, beyond what even I was prepared to expect from her." [The work was published in two large volumes, which were afterwards distributed into three post octavos in January or early in February 1811 anonymously, and after considerable precautions had been taken to preserve the secret of the authorship, which actually was, we are told, for a little time so well kept that she had frequent opportunities of hearing her work commented on. Mrs Brunton commenced a new novel, "Discipline;" but before it was completed "Waverley" appeared. It came into her hands, her husband says, while she was in the country, and when she had heard nothing of its reputation; but she at once discerned its high merit, and was so fascinated by it, that she could not go to bed till she had read it through. It happened that a scene of a part of her own work too was laid in the Highlands, about which a universal interest had been for some years before this awakened by Scott's "Lady of the Lake," and other poems; and her first impulse was to cancel the Highland portion of her story altogether; but to this sacrifice her husband strongly objected. Writing to one of her female friends in December, a few days before her new work was to appear, she says: "It is very unfortunate in coming after 'Waverley,' by far the most splendid exhibition of talent in novel-writing which has appeared since the days of Fielding and Smollett. There seems little doubt that it comes from the pen of Scott. What a competitor for poor little me!" When "Discipline" at length came out, however, its success was far greater than she anticipated. "But she was by no means gratified by it," we are told, "to the same extent she had been by the reception of 'Self-Control.' She was now well known to be the author, and therefore she was not so sure that the applause which reached her was all sincere." The silence of the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews, too, annoyed and discouraged her. All this indisposed her to attempt a third novel. Yet she commenced some other works, in which she proceeded slowly. But the end of all was at hand. After being married for twenty years, she had at last the prospect of becoming a mother. Her husband's interesting narrative proceeds:] "She was strongly impressed, indeed, with the belief that her confinement was to prove fatal, not in vague presentiment, but on grounds of which I could not entirely remove the force, though I obstinately refused to join in the inference which she drew from them. Under this belief, she completed every, the most minute, preparation for her great change, with the same tranquillity as if she had been making arrangements for one of those short absences which only endeared her home the more to her. The clothes with which she was laid in her grave had been selected by herself; she herself had chosen and labelled some tokens of remembrance for her more intimate friends; and the intimations of her death were sent round from a list in her own handwriting. But these anticipations, though so deeply fixed, neither shook her fortitude nor diminished her cheerfulness. They neither altered her wish to live, nor the ardour with which she prepared to meet the duties of returning health, if returning health were to be her portion. After giving birth to a still-born son on the 7th December, and recovering for a few days with a rapidity beyond the hopes of her medical friends, she was attacked with fever. It advanced with fatal violence, till it closed her earthly life on the morning of Saturday, December 19, 1818." <div class="figcenter p4"> <ANTIMG src="images/i221.jpg" width-obs="186" height-obs="44" alt="Decoration" /></div> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

1 of 2

2 of 2